One on the scaffold

When I first saw Patrice Sherro, I was twelve years old. Of course, I had no idea who it was, but his face - nervous, strange, with an ever -looking, restless look - remembered forever. I saw him on the screen, in the Polish cultural center at the embassy, ​​where a half -forced cinema was played in late perestroika - in particular, Dantona Andrzej Vaida: Camilla Demulen played there. A piercing memory of a man who so wants to live and does not want to the scaffold so much, laid out an imprint on all my subsequent lessons of history. Danton, played by Gerard Depardieu, was recalled (actually this picture was conceived as his benefit), namely, poor Demulen: a stranger, a loner in the epic world of stands and politicians.

Patrice Sherro was just that. It seems to be a Frenchman to the brain of bones - and so atypical, so lonely. There was no postmodern ease, irony, conventions and removal in its performances and films - heavyweight, taking for living, and just living. But also speculation, analysts, formalism, familiar to fans of the “new wave” or French philosophy, is also not a drop. It was no coincidence that he was so comfortable in the German (Wagner) and Austrian (from Mozart to Berg) the opera, it was not without reason that he was organically given to him, along with Maruvo and Rasin, Shakespeare and Ibsen, and Norwegian Yon Fosse was next to his beloved French-Marinar-Mari playwright. “Alone of the cotton fields” - that was the name of the main Kolitsov play, which he set and where he played with his beloved actor and many years of lover Pascal Gregory. Alone, tragic, but also honorary, he remained until the very end.

For the first time, I learned about the director of Sherro in the same 1994 when his “Queen Margo”, taking several Cannes prizes, was with us. I watched her at the Leningrad cinema, from where, as I remember now, I went out on a banging legs. Like any Soviet teenager who has learned all the main novels of Dumas by heart, I experienced a nonsense shock from gloomy expression and poisoning erotica of that film. It was impossible to drive them out of their heads: his Bartholomew’s night, like an infection, was forever laying a seal of a book about a book in which there has been no more frivolous humor and easy romance since then. Only dirt, sex, blood, horror of violence and a violent thirst for life.

It was his special gift: to become awake. Make ephemeral fabric of literature or music with flesh. Net the symbols to the ground, turn them into solid bodies. Demand empathy and achieve it at all costs. I remember, having bought an extra ticket with the hands before the premiere of his “Fedra” in 2003, I did not believe that I could hear and understand the Alexandrian verse. But after the performance, which I remember every scene, it seems so far - exciting, like a thriller, and frighteningly realistic, like a television port about a car accident - I ran to the store behind Tom Rasin and read it all, from the first page to the last. After this performance, it seemed to me that everything was there - about me and my loved ones. It still seems.

I have experienced the same thing more than once on his performances. Sad to tears " Cosi FAN Tutte ” , where the sadness of farewell with love suddenly erupted behind Mozart's harmony. And the elegic walk around the cemetery is the same museum - where in one of the graves this very love was probably buried in the surreal and beautiful “autumn dream” of Jona Fossa, set specifically for the Louvre (I remember, Nicolas Sarkozy and Carl Bruni sat in the hall, whose sister played the main role). And the unexpected resurrection of erotic euphoria in the murderous “Tristan and Isolde” set for La Scala, where during the final exit of the heroine - Waltraud Mayer, an extraordinary actress, and not just the best Wagnerian singer of her generation, her face was flooded with blood; So real that I wanted to call an ambulance.

In his versions of Wagner’s operas, after painfully intimate episodes-to take at least the farewell of Votan with the daughter Brungilda at the end of Valkyrie or the final of “Siegfried”, where Brungild and Siegfried, like two orphans, infantile and unfortunate, sing about their love not to each other, but missing internships (he-mother, mother She is a father), - the formidable exits of the choir followed. Not in the opera, but in the ancient Greek sense: it happened that the choir was present and silent. The loneliness of the heroes was only emphasized by the crowd surrounding them, as in the “dead house” by Leosha Yanachek-his, following the “Ring of the Nibelung” and “Lulu” by Alban Berg, Sherro did with the great Pierre Boulez, where the opera scene turned into a gulag, and in the midst of him he clashed to the span of spinner. Dostoevsky, by the way, was Sherrot’s favorite writer: he himself went out to the stage in two monopolists, “Notes from the underground” and “Great Inquisitor”, reading his prose-bewitching monotonon, without unnecessary acting. In this case, the auditorium acted as a choir.

In these exits to the public with a defiantly non -modern material (whether Rasin, Dumas or Fedor Mikhailovich with his paradoxalists), the remarkable courage was felt, which was full of even the most unsuccessful films - and they happened to Sherro both at the dawn of the film (“Hotel de France”) and in the final (a pretentious “persecution”). The courage of a pet who suddenly fell in love with death in a rude trestle gigolus is the plot of the “Wounded” (1983), for which Sherrot received his first “Cezar”. Or women who surrendered to a man anonymous in an accidental apartment, not even exchanging names, is in the name of a scarce heat, which is able to give not a close one, but a stranger ("intimate", 2000, a "golden bear" in Berlin). The first courage of love, forcing to be exposed, is in the coordinate system the roughness of the last courage of death, making a witness closer to his brother (“His brother”, 2003). Only this risk will help to overcome the stuffy everyday life of the French bourgeois comfort, according to which Sherro walked a dangerous razor in his avant -garde Gabrieli (2005).

Sherro was a scientist, a physician, a psychologist, an anthropologist from cinema. He hated abstractions and believed that any interpretation should correspond to the author’s plan: for months he investigated the texts of plays and the score of operas so as not to lie. And I have never lied. In French culture, his predecessors were Gustav Kurba with the “origin of the world” - the central canvas of the exhibition of the Louvre “Faces and Body”, whose curator was Sherro, and Emil Zola, for whose naturalism metaphysics were no less persistently disturbed. The concreteness of the Sherro method, a stubborn researcher of human nature, did not allow him to belong to any school or direction. Such as he was doomed to loneliness. But it never allowed him to dissolve in the crowd.

His last performance was to be “how you like it” in a Parisian dress. The premiere is still scheduled for March - and I want to believe that it will take place. What this production will be is impossible to say in advance. However, there is no doubt that in the Shakespearean gentlemen, ladies and jester, each of its spectators will recognize himself.